President Joe Biden reportedly ignored early warnings from advisors that his immigration platform could create a border crisis and dragged his feet on solutions as crossings reached historical levels.
Before Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States, experts were already cautioning his transition team that his immigration positions would likely stir chaos at the Mexico border, according to administration insiders who spoke to the New York Times. Biden and his team rebuffed these warnings, concerned they would lose Latino support and underestimating how much Americans would care about the issue.
“A potential surge could create chaos and a humanitarian crisis, overwhelm processing capacities, and imperil the agenda of the new administration,” read a memo created by several aides before the 2020 presidential election, which was obtained by the NYT.
That memo proved prophetic after Biden immediately got to work on dismantling the border enforcement apparatus established by the first Trump administration and overseeing the largest spike in illegal immigration.
Biden undertook a total of 296 executive actions on immigration in the first year of his presidency, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute. Of these executive actions, 89 reversed or began the process of reversing President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
The Democrat scrubbed major initiatives undertaken by the first Trump administration, such as ending border wall construction, the shutdown of the Remain in Mexico program and ending the COVID-era Title 42 health order that quickly expelled migrants.
Those actions quickly paved the way for a flood of illegal migrants descending into the country.
There were roughly 8.5 million southern border encounters during Biden’s time in the White House, with fiscal year 2023 and fiscal year 2024 being the worst years for migrant crossings in history. These numbers not only overwhelmed federal immigration officials and border states, but also became a problem for local officials in the interior of the country, forcing leaders in New York City, Denver and elsewhere to get tougher on illegal migrants.
As the situation at the border continued to escalate, the Biden administration reportedly kept rebuffing proposals to stem the situation out of political fears.
“They were a little too sensitive to criticisms from the left,” Cecilia Muñoz, who oversaw domestic and economic policy for the Biden transition team, said to the NYT.
The crisis dramatically changed Americans’ outlook on immigration enforcement, with polls at the time showing illegal immigration to be a top concern for Americans and more voters believing Trump would better handle the issue than Biden. A February 2024 YouGov survey found a mere 31% of Americans believing Biden to be the better candidate to fix the border, compared to 45% for Trump.
By the summer of 2024, a majority of Latino voters supported mass deportation of illegal migrants, smashing the Biden administration’s assumption that hawkish border policies would alienate the constituency.
In the waning days of their administration, both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris — who eventually became the Democratic presidential nominee — campaigned heavily in favor of a Senate border bill that, they argued, would’ve solved the border crisis. While Biden blamed Trump for not supporting the bill, insiders say the Biden White House initially wanted nothing to do with the legislation.
Democrat Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy and GOP Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, the bipartisan pair of lawmakers behind the Senate border bill, said the Biden White House refused to get involved when negotiations first began to gain momentum, according to the NYT.
By the summer of 2024, Biden finally issued an executive order that restricted the number of border crossings, a move that ultimately helped drive down the border crisis, but came too late for an electorate that had already decided Trump was the better candidate on immigration enforcement.
The Biden administration “had no strategy, because they had no goal,” Scott Shuchart, who joined the Biden White House in 2022 as a senior adviser at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told the NYT.
“All they had was wishing the problem would go away so that they could focus on the things they cared about,” Shuchart continued.
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